philsajonesen wrote:
Who else is in love with that spotlight rendering thingy on photoshop?  I'm afraid i'm becoming hooked.

I like the omni light. I use it in my black and white portraits for clients and it seems to be a hit.

philsajonesen wrote:
Who else is in love with that spotlight rendering thingy on photoshop?  I'm afraid i'm becoming hooked.

Can you give an example of what you are talking about?  Not sure what "thingy" you are referring to.

Livia

Kevin Connery wrote:
My experience has been that it can work for monochrome images. Color is problematic.

I haven't been able to get it to give me a realistic look in color, and I've seen hundreds (if not thousands) of images where that postprocessing was quite easily identified AS a postprocessing technique, to the (in my opinion) detriment of the image.  Based on that, it's evidently very difficult to get it to work seamlessly in color.

Even as a "quick" vignetting technique, it changes the contrast and saturation of the areas affected in a distinctive fashion, much like a paint-with-black vignette does.

Yep. Digital color is a very fragile thing. Not perfect, but worth a shot if you really need to spotlight a color pic: after rendering the spotlight click Edit>Fade, fade by Luminosity (100%). That gives you the spotlight without the color shift. But... perceived color and brightness values are so interconnected, you'll probably have to bring back some of the color from the spotlight; so select  Lighting Effects in the history palette, fill from history, then Edit>Fade, fade by Color (50%?)... I'd rather do it with a Curves adjustment layer (with a radial gradient layer mask), but by the time it looks right, you'll wish you'd just reshot...

I think it's one of the (many) PS effects that's easier in real life. Like a lot of things, grayscale is more forgiving (no color shift to fret about), but then you've got to turn that RGB image into a lush B&W, a whole 'nother box of bait...

easyonthe eyes wrote:
Yep. Digital color is a very fragile thing.

Well said.

For my purposes, Curves in Normal, Screen, Multiply, or Overlay modes have been faster and less work. But I'll give your technique a try, and see.

My major issue other than color is that the spotlighting effect 'spills' on what would be other layers in real life--a 'virtual' spotlight on a face, for example, doesn't stop on the face, nor contour it the same way, but unless very carefully masked, bleeds in an artificial way. That it can be avoided is unarguable; that other methods give comparable-or-better results in less time for me is similarly unarguable.

There's more than one way to do it.

easyonthe eyes wrote:
I think it's one of the (many) PS effects that's easier in real life. Like a lot of things, grayscale is more forgiving (no color shift to fret about), but then you've got to turn that RGB image into a lush B&W, a whole 'nother box of bait...

Yup. Even heavy-handed blurring can work more believably in monochrome than in color. Fortunately, there are many good ways to get a good monochrome image from a color one. Unfortunately, none of them help if you need good color, and, equally unfortunately, there's even more ways to get a bad monochrome image than a good one.

Kevin Connery wrote:
Fortunately, there are many good ways to get a good monochrome image from a color one. Unfortunately, none of them help if you need good color...

...unless at 4am, in a burst of genius or clammy-palmed desperation, you dupe the (color) background, drag it to the top of your B&W, set the blend mode to Color and give it a little blur... Eureka!

Then you wake up the next day and it looks like crap again.

(This actually can work to make a terrible image... merely bad. I can't imagine bothering unless somebody in$i$ts)